Hillary Clinton DID trigger Vince Foster's suicide ...Ken Starr

Hillary and her victim Vince Foster in happier times

Ken Starr purposefully left out the finding that Hillary Clinton had 'triggered' the suicide of President Clinton's Deputy White House Counsel in his final FBI report to spare her feelings, DailyMail.com can reveal. 

FBI agents investigating the death of Vince Foster learned he was set off after Hillary attacked and humiliated him in front of other White House aides a week before he took his own life on July 20, 1993. 

But for what were then unexplained reasons, Starr elected to conceal the FBI's finding that Hillary's tirade triggered Foster's suicide when he wrote his final report on the matter.

At a reception for authors participating in the 2019 Annapolis Book Festival last weekend, I asked Starr why he omitted the damaging FBI finding.

At first, he beat around the bush, citing well-established facts indicating that Foster was already depressed before Hillary lashed into him at the White House meeting.

But when pressed, Starr admitted he 'did not want to inflict further pain' on Hillary by revealing that her humiliation of Foster a week before he took his own life pushed him over the edge.

In interviews for my book The First Family Detail, the FBI agents who worked the case for Starr revealed the truth about Foster's death when he shot himself at Fort Marcy Park along the Potomac River.

The investigation into Foster's death was conducted for independent counsel Starr's probe of the Clintons' investments in the Whitewater real estate development. 

In interviewing Clinton White House aides and Foster's friends and family, the FBI agents found that a week before Foster's death, Hillary as First Lady held a meeting at the White House with Foster and other top aides to discuss her proposed health care legislation.  

Hillary violently disagreed with a legal objection Foster raised at the meeting and ridiculed him in front of his peers, former FBI agent Coy Copeland and former FBI supervisory agent Jim Clemente told me. 

Copeland was Starr's senior investigator and read the reports of other agents working for Starr.

During the White House meeting, Hillary continued to humiliate Foster mercilessly, both former FBI agents said.

'Hillary put him down really, really bad in a pretty good-size meeting,' Copeland said. 'She told him he didn't get the picture, and he would always be a little hick town lawyer who was obviously not ready for the big time.' 

Indeed, Hillary went so far as to blame Foster for all the Clintons' problems and to accuse him of failing them, according to Clemente, who was also assigned by the FBI to the Starr investigation and who probed the circumstances surrounding Foster's suicide.

'Foster was profoundly depressed, but Hillary lambasting him was the final straw because she publicly embarrassed him in front of others,' said Clemente, who, like Copeland, was speaking about the investigation for the first time.

'Hillary blamed him for failed nominations, claimed he had not vetted them properly, and said in front of his White House colleagues, ''You're not protecting us'' and ''You have failed us,'' Clemente said. 'That was the final blow.

After the meeting, Foster's behavior changed dramatically, the FBI agents found. Those who knew Foster said his voice sounded strained, he became withdrawn and preoccupied, and his sense of humor vanished. At times, Foster teared up. He talked of feeling trapped.

On Tuesday, July 13, 1993, while having dinner with his wife Lisa, Foster broke down and began to cry. He said he was considering resigning. 

That weekend, Foster and his wife drove to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where they saw their friends, Michael Cardoza and Webster Hubbell, and their wives.

'They played tennis, they swam, and they said he sat in a lawn chair, just kind of sat there in the lawn chair,' Copeland said. 'They said that just was not Vince. He loved to play tennis, and he was always sociable, but he just sat over in the corner by himself and stared off into space, reading a book.'

Two days later, Foster left the White House parking lot at 1.10pm. The precise time when he shot himself could not be pinpointed. After Park Police found his body, they notified the U.S. Secret Service at 8.30pm.

Based on what 'dozens' of others who had contact with Foster after that meeting told the agents, while Foster was already depressed, 'The put-down that she gave him in that big meeting just pushed him over the edge,' Copeland said. 'It was the final straw that broke the camel's back.'

No one can explain a suicide in rational terms. But the FBI investigation concluded that it was Hillary's vilification of Foster in front of other White House aides — coming on top of his ongoing depression — that triggered the White House official's suicide about a week later, Copeland and Clemente both say.

Starr issued a 38,000-word report, along with a separate psychologist's report on the factors that contributed to Foster's suicide. Yet Starr never mentioned the meeting with Hillary, leaving out the fact that his own investigation had found that Hillary's rage had led to her friend's suicide.

In his book Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation that came out last September, Starr lists the pressures Foster was under, including that the deputy White House counsel's 'close friend Hillary didn't seem grateful. She excoriated Foster within earshot of others, then gave him the cold shoulder for weeks.' 

However, Starr's official report excludes even that negative finding by the FBI.

Why Starr chose to conceal the critical meeting and his own investigators' finding that Hillary's tirade triggered Foster's suicide remained a mystery until now. When I asked Starr for comment on the question for my book The First Family Detail that came out in 2014, he did not respond. A spokesman for Hillary Clinton also had no comment.

While the Clintons claimed Starr was out to get them, Clemente says that as his staff changed, Starr vacillated between pursuing the investigation aggressively and pulling his punches. 

For example, the former FBI supervisory agent reveals that Starr refused to allow him to try to interview Hillary about her commodities trading. For reasons still unknown, in her first commodity trade in 1978, Hillary was allowed to order ten cattle futures contracts, which would normally cost $12,000, although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released.

Hillary was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight. In ten months of trading, she made nearly $100,000. She claimed she made smart trades based on information from the Wall Street Journal. The question, Clemente says, was why she was allowed to make investments while ignoring normal margin calls that require traders to cover any losses incurred during the course of trading.

Starr's report recounted how the FBI ran down even the most bizarre theories about Foster's death and conducted extensive ballistics tests that refuted assertions that Foster had not committed suicide. 

Yet in his report, Starr never referred to the meeting where Hillary humiliated Foster in front of aides, nor to the sharp change in Foster's disposition afterward, findings that would have supported the report's conclusion that Foster committed suicide.

The FBI agents' findings are included in their reports of interviews, according to David Paynter, the archivist who read the reports when cataloging them at the National Archives. However, I found that those reports are now missing from the appropriate files at the National Archives in Suitland, Maryland.

After I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the records, John Valceanu, the archives' director of communications and marketing, confirmed that the records could not be located, but he said that did not necessarily mean that they had been stolen. 

He held out the possibility that the FBI interviews were not filed where they should have been and were somewhere else in the more than 3,000 boxes of records amounting to 7.5 million pages generated by the Starr investigation.

Since Starr never told Copeland or Clemente why he decided to exclude the FBI findings from his report, the former FBI agents could only speculate on his reasoning.

'Starr didn't want to offend the conscience of the public by going after the first lady,' Clemente said. 'He said the first lady is an institution. He acted most of the time as a judge instead of as an investigating prosecutor, and then he hired attorneys who went to the other extreme.'

Told that Starr justified his decision to exclude the fact that Hillary was the chief culprit in Foster's suicide by saying he did not want to 'inflict additional pain,' Clemente, now a retired FBI profiler, commented that Starr 'looked at every issue as an intellectual exercise and was a gentleman in every way. If he had any flaw, perhaps it was that he was too kind.'

If so, he should not have been a prosecutor and suppressed a key finding of an investigation that cost taxpayers $39.2 million.